It’s Time to Address the Crypto Content Quality Problem
Founder’s Note: Announcing Crypto Handbook
I’m excited to announce the launch of Crypto Handbook, the home on Medium for high-quality stories on everything cryptocurrency, NFT, and Web3.
Entrepreneur’s Handbook is adding this new editorial brand because of rising market trends, the Crypto Content Quality Problem, and because our philosophy can bring much-needed clarity and quality to an enigmatic industry.
If you’re new to Medium, or to Entrepreneur’s Handbook, welcome! Let me provide some background.
Medium, born and raised
I founded Entrepreneur’s Handbook in 2015, when Medium was just starting to open its doors to the public. I didn’t have a plan to grow it into a top ten Medium publication as it is today, I just wanted to publish cool stories about what I and others were learning from our entrepreneurial journeys.
Today, Entrepreneur’s Handbook is a team of three editors and we’re lucky to publish great writers who are paid through the Medium partner program. We are supported by 215k amazing followers and our community is growing by 100 new followers per day. We run a podcast and virtual summits for entrepreneurs.
The Handbook secret sauce
What made Entrepreneur’s Handbook stand out is our commitment to quality. Even at the expense of views and earnings, we didn’t strive to publish a high volume of stories each week. Only the ones that met our editorial standards, even if that meant a mere two stories a week.
What are EH’s editorial standards?
Entrepreneur’s Handbook was created with three foundational beliefs about writing and publishing:
- The story “formula.” We’ve found that our readers love a simple formula for an article: inspirational story + practical takeaways. The first part means every story needs to have a first-hand account. A first-person POV. A central character writing from an “I” perspective. This ensures authenticity. It means the story is anchored in a real human’s life experience and the best ones do it with a healthy dollop of professional vulnerability. The second part is every story needs to take this first-person story and summarize it into bullet-point takeaways so that the reader can easily apply them to his or her own life. It takes the value of the writer’s story and translates it into the reader’s story in a self-aware, actionable, and genuinely helpful way.
- The brand. Our philosophy is quality over quantity at all costs. I’d rather publish nothing over a poor-quality story. Our editors work closely with our writers to improve headlines, the lede, the credibility, and overall delivery of the piece. We protect the brand and in doing so, reject 95% of our submissions. We value our readers over our revenue.
- The promise. We strive to help readers turn their ideas into income. Always. This is the heart and soul of entrepreneurship — we are on a mission to help entrepreneurs succeed, whether you’re a side business indie hacker, a bootstrapped local shop owner, a freelancer to agency founder, or hypergrowth VC-backed startup. We exist to help people turn their ideas in their heads into cash in their hands. In the end, you will make more money reading Entrepreneur’s Handbook than you are now, whether it’s directly or indirectly. That’s our vision, pure and simple.
Shifting gears, let’s talk about crypto.
The Dabblers and the Technicals
From my view, there are two types of people in the cryptocurrency world, the Dabblers and the Technicals.
“I’m a Bitcoin-Ethereum kind of crypto investor,” a friend told me the other day.
“Me too,” I said.
This is the first type.
What we were really saying to each other was that neither one of us was a “serious” cryptocurrency investor.
This happens all the time.
Whenever I speak with someone about cryptocurrency, there’s always a self-dissolving disclaimer that “I am not an expert.” It seems nobody truly understands the way it works. We all seem to just have a general acceptance of a few truths: that it’s real, it’s early days but probably the future, a lot of people are talking about it, and you can make money from it. We are the Dabblers.
The second type of cryptocurrency personas is the Technicals.
The Technicals tend to be developers, programmers, and builders. They understand code, web3, and financial markets better than most people. For whatever reason, they tend to have anonymous social media accounts. And there’s a high chance they like Elon Musk, the Doge King.
These folks know enough about cryptocurrency to write about it, to speak about it on Twitter Spaces, to even get involved in a “project” such as developing a new coin or minting a new NFT series.
The Crypto Content Quality Problem comes from the second group of people creating content that the first group of people doesn’t understand.
The Crypto Content Quality Problem
I’m not sure why this divide is so wide, but this tendency of crypto pros towards esotericism isn’t great for building mainstream trust, something decentralized finance could use right now.
Two reasons come to mind for why this problem exists:
1. The Curse of Knowledge
Cognitive psychologist and author Steven Pinker writes about the curse of knowledge in his book The Sense of Style and I believe it captures exactly an issue with a lot of crypto content today:
The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose. It simply doesn’t occur to the writer that her readers don’t know what she knows — that they haven’t mastered the patois of her guild, can’t divine the missing steps that seem too obvious to mention, have no way to visualize a scene that to her is as clear as day. And so she doesn’t bother to explain the jargon, or spell out the logic, or supply the necessary detail.
So either nobody truly understands cryptocurrency enough to “explain it like I’m five” a la the words of Albert Einstein — “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it…”
Or maybe Technicals understand it just fine, they just aren’t communicating it well enough for readers to grasp. But this presents another problem. Frank Luntz, political and communications consultant, wrote a book on his methods called Words That Work and the subhead says it all:
“It’s not what you say, it’s what they hear.”
The information about crypto may all be true, but in order for it to be helpful, it has to resonate with the reader, not just the writer. A fourth-grade teacher who teaches her students at an 11th-grade level isn’t helping them learn, she’s just confusing them.
I believe a Handbook approach is an opportunity to bring both sides of the crypto community together on Medium. You’ll see more on this below.
But there’s another side to the Crypto Content Quality Problem coin, if you will.
2. We’re being sold something.
Scams, schemes, and sketchy operations plague the cryptocurrency markets. It’s rife with hackery and new takes on Ponzi schemes. I build an investable asset out of code. You pay me cash to invest in that asset. That asset turns out to be worthless. You lose your cash.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m very bullish on crypto. I’m a user. I scanned Coinbase’s Superbowl ad. It’s just the age-old problem of innovation without regulation is very real in the crypto world. New technology is tough to regulate and even tougher at scale. In unregulated markets, it’s easier to get away with schemes. Unsuspecting newbies stumble upon “gold” information and get persuaded to jump on board a bandwagon headed nowhere. In its current state, many consider crypto is still a wild west frontier — one with inherent risk and an uncomfortable level of volatility.
So with crypto content, how do you distinguish the bad from the good? This is the mission of Crypto Handbook.
Having had a career as both a writer and a marketer, I can tell you that marketing content is fundamentally different from editorial content, which is what we need in this space. Marketing content tends to be littered with heavy CTAs, backlinking, listicles, and SEO formatting. It’s easy to spot if a writer is writing purely for the purpose of promotion. It degrades the quality of the article. In order for a handbook to truly embody a “handbook” — a trusty guide along a journey — it must be educational, authentic, and marketing-free.
Introducing Crypto Handbook
The plan for Crypto Handbook is to apply the editorial approach of Entrepreneur’s Handbook to the world of cryptocurrency content.
The expectation is that a “handbook” approach to cryptocurrency content will function as a content quality filter.
So in order for a handbook to be effective, it needs to be trusted, up-to-date, easy to understand, and accurate in its information.
So my promise to you is that every Crypto Handbook story will have three components:
- A personal narrative. A central character tells a story from the first-person POV. This builds trust and anchors the story in human empathy. Example: I Bought Bitcoin in 2006. Here’s How Much It’s Worth Now. Example #2: I Accidentally Created a Shitcoin.
- A slant towards entrepreneurship. We’re here to help readers create value and wealth in whatever form they prefer, whether that’s through an hourly rate, a salary, a side project, passive income, investing, owning a business, or something else. If it doesn’t help our readers be smarter with their time and money, we won’t publish it.
- Practical takeaways. Lessons built on experience that the reader can quickly apply to their own situations. Example: Price your NFTs using basic supply and demand economics. The more copies in the market, the lower your price should be to make sales. The fewer copies, the higher the price due to the theory of scarcity value.
Go deeper: read our editorial guidelines for Crypto Handbook here.
Calls to action
- Have a crypto story to share? We want to hear it and potentially publish it. Submit your story here.
- Who’s the best crypto writer you trust? Let us know and we’d be happy to reach out to them. Intros appreciated.
- Share this post on Twitter and tag Entrepreneur’s Handbook (@ entrehandbook).
- Donate to support the Entrepreneur’s Handbook publication and receive our original NFT “Cool Tech Companies” from our community.
Any questions? (NO NEW WRITER OR SUBMISSION REQUESTS) Shoot us an email at entrepreneurshandbookco (at) gmail (dot) com.
